1. Field of the Invention
There is a continuing interest and concern with the diagnosis and treatment of neoplastic conditions. A major source of death are neoplastic conditions associated with T- and B-lymphocytes. While much progress has been made in the treatment of lymphoma and leukemia, there are still no generally accepted methods for diagnosis and treating such disease states. It would therefore be of great interest to be able to diagnosis the onset of a lymphocytic neoplastic condition and to treat such condition, whereby the disease could be arrested or eradicated.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Weissman and Baird, Life Sciences Research Report 7 (Koprowski, ed.) p. 135 (1977); McGrath and Weissman, In Normal and Neoplastic Hemapoeitic Cell Differentiation, p. 577. Cold Spring Harbor Press, New York (1978), and Weissman et al., In Life Sciences Research Report, Dahlem Conference, in press, (1984) discuss the receptor-mediated leukemogenesis hypothesis. Hood et al., Immunology, 2nd Ed., Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Co. (1984) reports that antigen binding to antigen receptors of immunocompetent lymphocytes starts the chain of events bringing the lymphocytes into the cell cycle. In mice each T-cell lymphoma has specific receptors for the retrovirus which induces it and in mice and in chickens. These receptors are present only on malignant clones which arise late in the pre-leukemic period and are not present on the population of non-malignant cells which proliferate abundantly throughout that period. McGrath et al., J. Virol. (1978) 28:819; McGrath and Weissman, Cell (1979) 17:65; and McGrath and Weissman, In Human T-cell Leukemia/Lymphoma Virus (Gallo et al., eds.), Cold Spring Harbor Press, New York, p. 205 (1984). Antibodies which prevent virus-binding to lymphoma cells in vitro also prevent their proliferation and this effect is reversible by the addition of free cognate retrovirus for some cell lines. McGrath et al., Nature (1980) 285:259. See also McGrath et al., In Experimental Hematology Today (Baum et al., eds.) p. 93 (1982). Allison et al., J. Immunol. (1982) 129:2293, report a clonotypic antibody, specific for the T-cell antigen receptor heterodimer on a Radiation Leukemia Virus (RadLV) induced T-cell lymphoma.